Murder in Bollywood Read Online Free PDF Page A

South Mumbai business community. The fifty-year-old businessman’s body was found in the parking lot of his office building, shot twice at close range, and the ballistics report confirmed that the weapon used in the murder was the deceased’s own gun which he himself had reported stolen the week before. When the crime branch took over the case, they discovered that when the late Vidyut Tarachand had filed the stolen weapon complaint with the Malabar Hill police station, he had named one Sahil Khanna as the person he suspected of the theft, which was interesting as the nineteen-year-old was his teenage daughter’s boyfriend. Anyway, the police sprung into action the moment the complaint was lodged and after running a background check on Sahil, which revealed that he had been arrested before for theft and possession of drugs, went all out to apprehend him, but he was nowhere to be found. And after Vidyut Tarachand was killed, they intensified their search tenfold, but even then Sahil, along with the murder weapon, remained out of reach. Then late one night, two weeks after the murder, the Malabar Hill police station received a frantic call from Anita Tarachand, the thirty-five-year-old wife of the deceased, who claimed that she had shot and killed an intruder in her house. On reaching the Tarachand bungalow, the police found Sahil Khanna lying in the living room in a pool of blood, shot three times, and still clutched in his hand was the gun which had been used to kill Vidyut Tarachand. In her statement to the police, a visibly shaken Anita revealed that at around 2 a.m. when she was asleep upstairs in her bedroom, she was suddenly awakened by noises coming from the living room below, which was odd as all the servants had retired to their quarters for the night and her sixteen-year-old daughter Rhea was lying sedated in the adjoining room, having taken her father’s death very badly; so she grabbed her licensed revolver that she kept by her bedside ever since her husband’s murder and went downstairs to investigate. As she entered the living room, she saw a figure standing fifteen to twenty feet away with his back towards her, but since the entire floor was very dimly lit, she couldn’t make out anything else about the intruder. She then pointed her gun in the man’s direction and in a clear, loud voice told him that she was armed and if he didn’t leave the way he came, she would open fire. But instead of walking away quietly, the man spun around sharply with his arm raised as if he, too, was carrying a gun, so she instinctively pulled the trigger and he dropped dead. Anita also claimed that she discovered the intruder was Sahil much later, and told the police that the reason Sahil killed her husband was because Vidyut thoroughly despised him and had even convinced Rhea to break off her relationship with him, in response to which Sahil decamped with silverware and other valuables from the Tarachand residence, including a gun. Anita believed that Sahil broke into her home the night he was killed to probably steal something else, as he always needed money to fuel his drug habit, or maybe even to kill Rhea for jilting him, after which he might’ve killed her too, because on a number of occasions even she had tried to get her daughter to end her relationship with him. So, all in all, it had all the makings of an open-and-shut case, with the shooting of Sahil at the hands of Anita coming across as an act of self-defence, not punishable by law. But Meeta Kashyap, who was assistant commissioner of police (crime branch) back then, had other ideas. In her capacity as lead investigator in the case, she had come to believe that it was Anita who had plotted Vidyut’s murder with the help of Sahil, and after she got him to kill her husband, she lured Sahil to her home, where she eliminated him in cold blood, thereby taking care of all loose ends. However, the only problem with this theory was that she didn’t have any evidence to